Additional resources for Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors: Ironies of Repetition in the Work of Guy de Maupassant

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It is Cornudet' s flatness which makes him a memorable character; it is the manner of that flatness which makes him an interesting, yet disturbing character. His beard, for example, has retained the colour of the beer which he consumes almost continuously. The environment has, as it were, left its mark on him. The reduction and repetition Character in Maupassant 41 of his activity has modified his physical appearance. He is monopolised by that activity. As he drinks he is able to concentrate on nothing else, his beard quivers with pleasure and his eyes cross.

Forster in his Aspects of the Novel. Forster draws a distinction between 'flat' and 'round' characters: Flat characters were called 'humours' in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed around a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, then we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. 6 'Round' characters are defined, indirectly, as those characters who are a composition of several or many qualities, characters whom we cannot sum up in any neat formula: 'The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way.

Indeed, the aristocratic and the artistic are synonymous for Maupassant. The artistic and the popular sensibilities are incompatible. ' (ii, 231)_12 The essentially qualitative difference between the artist and the masses excludes popular art, a contradiction in terms for Maupassant. In 'A propos de peuple', he underlines this when he writes, 'L'Art, quel qu'il soit, ne s'adresse qu'a l'aristocratie intellectuelle d'un Maupassant's Journalism 31 pays. Je m'etonne qu'on puisse confondre' (ii, 274).